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Three seconds …

PublishedMay 29, 2012

How long does it take for someone to make a decision on whether or not you will give a candidate a good interview? How does three seconds sound? Guess what; it probably takes even less for a CV to be to be accepted or rejected!

Consider this:You are waiting for a candidate seeking a job and you are the interviewer. The door opens and you know pretty much what you are looking for, but you are willing to be surprised, as long as it is pleasantly. A foot comes through the open door: “Freeze Frame”! You have just made a judgement it is not considered, it is not objective it IS based on years of experience, prejudice and belief structures; yours! All this and you have only seen a foot! You may change your opinion as the interview progresses, and even get to like the person, but there is no such chance with a CV. The first few seconds will determine its fate; acceptance or rejection. If the presentation is poor there will be no second chance. People say to me but that is not the way it should be done. Every CV should be evaluated and, on its merit, candidates should be selected for interview, and they would be right. But the world is not fair, and all people are not wise, and time is money, and most clichés are clichés because they are founded in truth. Dare I say one more thing; HR people often help make the rules but do not always follow them. I have asked junior HR people sifting CVs into yes and no piles how they could make such snap judgments in such a short time and have in some cases been staggered by the response. Here are a few:

The latter of these caused me to rub the document between my thumb and forefinger in an attempt to determine the weight and/or thickness of the paper. It was then I realised the thickest thing in the room was me, for assuming the word feel, was to be taken literally. So what defines an appealing, or even better, compelling document? Firstly it has to have “feel good factor”. Yes, fonts are important and need to convey in their message that you are in tune with the organisation they are being sent to. You will find what they like on their website. How many pages pages? Two; if it takes you a full three you are either waffling or giving them your last job description. It should be said here that making the font tiny will just send your manuscript, unread, to the shredding pile. If you think that you just have so much to say consider a recent client who sent us 38 pages of totally disparate information which took us 16 Hours to edit down to anything worth reading and then flipped when we left out the name of a book she had based her degree dissertation on.

So here are some absolute-cv rules to get you through the three second screening and into interview:

About content; If it doesn’t get you into the interview it doesn’t get into the CV

About aesthetics; When you look at the CV it looks great (Even before it gets read)

About factor X; Something about it says yes pile

Get this right and you will have a winning document. If you want to be absolutely certain though you could ask us to appraise what you have we’ll do it for nothing, and if it can’t be improved on we’ll tell you. We might even offer you a job!